This introductory text is written for students faced with the question "what is history?’ Polemical in tone, the book argues against a skills-based approach to history in favour of a methodological one. Drawing widely on developments in philosophy, literary theory, critical theory and politics, Keith Jenkins argues that history must abandon the search for objective truth about the past and come to terms with its own processes of production. Brief, provocative and well-argued, the book aims to develop in its readers an historicist, sceptical, critical intelligence that will open up a new understanding of what history is, and can be, in the post-modern world.